Bill Hicks, the most scathing comedian of his generation, died in 1994 at age 32, but he hasn’t gone away. On the contrary, the mischievously shifting
sands of history have granted an eerie afterlife to some of his material – you
can play a recording of a Hicks routine from 1991 or ’92 and hear him going after
President Bush and the war in Iraq. But Hicks’ growing stature as a comedic beacon
isn’t because of a quirky recurrence of a name and war zone. Hicks went deeper than
any of his contemporaries, and he did it with missionary zeal and fearless brilliance.